The New Risk Management Education

Between trying to tune out the heart-rending sobs of the manager
whose unit was surcharged by your cost allocation formula and
meditating on the comp claim by the safety manager who hurt his
back demonstrating safe lifting techniques, have you ever wondered
what colleges are now teaching in risk management?

This wonder can be resolved by examining the catalog of the Ruritanian
Institute of Risk Management, a recently formed educational establishment
in Northwest Ruritania. Here is a sampling of their courses, as
described in the catalog.

English 142. Insurance Policy Dissection and Analysis.
A heuristic journey into the arcane world of policy wordsmanship.
Many 100-page specimens are viewed with special attention to terms
of art such as occurrence, property damage,
and the. Not recommended for those with queasy stomachs.

Statistics 115. Actuarial Analysis of Claims by Lithuanians.
A penetrating investigation into the Bonhoffer Theory of Past
Contingencies (named after its creator, Leonard J. Waxdeck). The
subset of Lithuanians is selected for study because their extreme
scarcity greatly simplifies the analysis.

Management 122. Intermediary Disintermediation. Borrowing
a term from finance to represent replacing an old broker by a
new one, our Emeritus Professor of Logomachy has prepared a psychologically
penetrating workshop wherein brokers are measured by 683 criteria,
each weighted by 295 10-point factors, creating 2,014,850 possible
points. Not usable in the real world, but impressive to many managers.

English 101. Report Writing. The overarching importance
of clear, crystalline, pellucid, as well as concise, pithy, terse,
straightforward writing to the success and ultimate business triumph
and grandiloquent accomplishment of a risk manager can not be
overstated. In the words of our placement officer, Its
not who you know in the world that counts. Its whom.

Management 255. Litigation Management. A lab course. Each
student will be supplied a live lawyer, carefully hypnotized by
an expert to be honestly responsive to the questioner. Students
ask their lawyer probing questions, such as How is it possible
to bill 84 hours in one day? or Why do 30-minute depositions
take 6 hours? The lawyer is then brought out of the trance,
everyone has a good laugh, and the student has a book full of
useful notes.

Management 112. Typing for Executives. The growing use
of keyboard machines by executives makes touch typing an important
skill. For the students image protection, the course title
is shown as Projects in Advanced Decision-Making. Entry
to the windowless typing rooms is through double doors with armed
guards to repel the curious.

Humanities 101. World Culture. Departing, as is the scholarly
trend today, from the culture of dead, white, European males,
this course takes an epistemological view of deconstructive scholarship,
where meaning may be either nothing at all or everything
at once, which is the same thing. The semiotic theory of affirmative
negativity is contrasted with negative affirmation. Pre-requisite:
suspension of critical thought.